Five tips for generating sales leads on social networks

13-11-2018Priscillia Granval

Social networks are an essential tool for generating leads.
If you think that they are only a means of conveying your brand image, think again! When used correctly, they can generate qualified contacts and boost your sales!

What marketing professional has not dreamt of being able to communicate instantly with an audience that has already shown an interest in their brand and products? Or to have quick feedback on their publications and their contacts’ expectations?

Don’t waste another second! Below are five tips for generating sales leads on social networks.

1. Direct your followers to your website to try and convert them into firm leads

In any lead generation strategy, website content is a key element for attracting prospects and taking them through the conversion funnel to turn them into customers.

The people that follow you on social networks, and who have shown interest in your products, are just contacts for the moment, and you do not have a lot of information about them apart from their interest in your brand.

Your website is a great landing place for these contacts due to its content and forms.

Use social networks to promote your content and your blog articles. Encourage contacts to follow you onto your website and to leave their contact details.

As with any tool used to generate leads, you must know your target in order to deliver the right messages.

Offer them content to download in order to incite them to leave their contact details. Note that in the B2B sector, case studies and white papers are the most effective content in this respect.

You must also adapt your communication to the social network(s) on which you publish content.
The space available for publishing information is very restricted on Twitter (280 characters) and more visual on Instagram or Pinterest.

However, as a general rule, the objective is to publish a clear and compelling message in just a few words. The message must be well designed, so be creative and stand out from the crowd! Use visual content (pictures, videos, GIFs), and hashtags that attract contacts who do not necessarily follow you on the network. Use a site like Hashtags.org to find hashtags that are relevant to your business.

2. Set up a publishing schedule … and stick to it!

Every strategy must be studied and planned in advance. Communicating on social networks is no exception to the rule.

If you do not have a community manager whose role is to publish messages, coordinate your communities and respond to requests and questions, you need to schedule your publications to organise yourself effectively.

This will force you to regularly publish content and have an overview of the content already promoted and to follow the trends in your market.

In our connected world, everything moves very quickly, and this is all the more true on social networks. Brands and people communicate daily on these sites. You must therefore be present on a regular basis. Do not take too long to answer any messages from contacts!

To create an effective publishing schedule, you must ask yourself two questions:

Who are you talking to?

What is your objective?

The typical “character” profiles you defined when creating your strategy will be very useful here. This will allow you to schedule posts that respond to the expectations of your prospects and link them to the content that you have created on your site.

Once your schedule is in place, you should review it to see if it has the desired impact on your community. If this is not the case, adjust it!

3. Carry out a strategic market watch

Monitoring competitors and their strategies is par for the course for many professionals in marketing. It is equally valid on social networks to understand what is happening in your market, who your competitors are, and what your prospects are looking for.

This market watch will allow you to define your publishing schedule, keep abreast of trends in your market, find new ideas by understanding the issues facing your prospects, and remain informed of what is being said about your brand and products!

Do not ignore this last point, it is equally important to monitor the market and its reactions to your own brand and products. Do not forget that social networks build your reputation.

Finally, conducting a market watch will allow you to assess the performance of your strategy and your messages.

These assessments and measurements are crucial to enable you to adapt your strategy and future actions.

When you put of your strategy in place, you define your goals.
Thanks to these goals, you will know what performance indicators you need to analyze once your campaigns are launched.

It is generally important to measure:

the involvement of your contacts on your page, as regards the content published (interactions including likes, shares, comments).

the total number of fans, followers and subscribers on the different social networks

the traffic generated on your website thanks to tools like Google Analytics

the clicks generated by the links. This allows you to assess all the content that is relevant to your community and your audience’s preferred formats according to the social network in question.

the conversion rate which is strongest indicator of commitment and which will provide valuable information about these contacts.

Assessing the performance of your lead generation strategy on social networks allows you to take the decisions needed to fine-tune your strategy and make it even more effective.Analysis is a strategic aspect that will highlight areas for improvement and development, as well as your strengths and weaknesses.

5. Pay for advertising

Communication on social networks is free for everyone. So why set aside a budget to to pay for adverts?

First of all because all the people that follow you will not necessarily see all the publications that you post. Also because you can reach people who do not follow you and thus broaden your audience.

Paying for advertising campaigns on social networks will enable you to highlight your presence, help you stand out from the competition and reach a wider audience than you originally defined, using the segmentation tools proposed by the various networks. The networks offer quite comprehensive targeting options and give you the opportunity to segment your audience according to location, gender, age, habits, interests.

Paying for advertising campaigns on social networks provides considerable benefits:

Prices are often attractive

Simple and quick to put the campaign online

Controlled costs

Virtually instantaneous returns

Make sure you target your audience properly and analyze the performance of your campaign, as you would when sending an email marketing shot!

As we have seen, social networks are a crucial tool to be included in your lead-generation strategy, along with email campaigns and content creation.

Social networks will help you to achieve many goals, such as positioning yourself as an expert in your field, building your reputation, understanding your customers better. Notably, they will enable you to interact instantly with prospects who have shown an interest in your brand.